Top Back muscle exercises

Only couple of individuals acknowledge and comprehend the significance of having a solid back. They'll hurried to enhance their leg quality or lift weights to make their biceps bigger and stronger however disparage the significance of fortifying their back.

In case you're a weight coach or beefy beefcake, the genuine measure of how great you are lies in how solid your back is. Numerous back torments can be disposed of

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Why YOU Should Deadlift

What is a Deadlift?

A deadlift is a compound activity where an individual will lift a barbell, went hand in hand with weights, off the ground, while held with his or her hands. Obviously, this is simply a fast clarification of the lift, so kindly don't attempt to perform this lift essentially focused around this depiction.

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BOOST YOUR BENCH PRESS, SQUAT, AND DEAD-LIFT

Mastering the three basic lifts is essential for building an awesome body. Learning these variations can turn awesome to amazing.

When it comes to building muscle and strength, three exercises can kick sand in the face of pretty much any other move out there. I'm talking about "the big three" for getting big: the squat, bench press, and deadlift.

Unfortunately, performing these exercises endlessly can lead to stagnation—

mental and physical—and once your brain hits the exit, your gains are likely to go on hiatus, too.

Sure, you could ditch these exercises for a while and embark on an entirely new program to shake things up, but these are awesome moves and gym staples for good reason.

So, I have plan that can give you the best of both worlds: the gains these exercises undeniably and inevitably produce, but enough variety to hold your interest, too. Try these variations after your basic sets for the big three exercises. It's as simple as that—and the resulting gains will amaze you.

The muscle-making and strength-building magic happens in three basic ways:

• You do more work than before, which leads to progress.
• Your body adapts neurologically, which leads to even more progress.
• Your work on the variations will improve your technique on the originals.

Check out these variations for each of the big three lifts, and learn how you can implement them to elevate your training and improve your physique!

1

 DEADLIFT VARIATIONS

Complete your planned rep and weight scheme of deadlifts, and then try one of the following variations:

DEFICIT DEADLIFTS

This variation is for more advanced lifters and is designed to help increase the range of motion. Basically, elevate your feet 1-2 inches off the ground and pull from there. You can stand on top of 45-pound plates, use hard mats, or a short box.

DEFICIT DEADLIFT

When performing the deficit deadlift, I recommend dropping the weight by 10-20 percent. The set and rep scheme would be identical to that of your deadlift off the ground.

ROMANIAN DEADLIFTS

Drop the weight 10-20 percent and perform 3-5 additional sets of 3-8 repetitions.

BLOCK PULLS

Blocks pulls are not to be confused with rack pulls, which use the power rack. Placing the bar on the pins of a power rack takes any slack out of the bar and changes the lift drastically.

For a block pull, simply elevate the plates 1-4 inches off the ground by using mats, blocks, or even other 45-pound plates. Then either use the same weight as you did on your last set or add up to 10 percent to the bar.

Complete another few sets at the same number of repetitions you used for deadlift.

2

 SQUAT VARIATIONS

Similarly, after crushing your regularly scheduled squats, you could work in one of these variations for getting out of particularly troublesome sticking points:

PAUSE SQUATS

"BRUTAL IS ONE WAY TO DESCRIBE THE PAUSE SQUAT."

Brutal is one way to describe the pause squat. Brutally effective, that is. A pause squat is just as it sounds: an ever-so-slight pause at the bottom, then bounce right back up.

I recommend dropping the bar weight by 10-20 percent and performing a few more sets at the same rep range this way. One to three seconds at the bottom more than suffices.

The paused position should be where you actively hold the weight up, not in the fully rested position. If you drop to the verybottom, you'd most likely engage the end range of your joints to create stability, but not so much your muscles to create the much preferred "active" stability.

PIN SQUATS

Try squatting from the pins. The pins change the nature of the exercise by removing the lowering (eccentric) portion. To set these up, move the safety pins in your squat rack so they hold the bar in a position where you are at or about 1-2 inches above parallel.

With the pins set and the bar loaded, dip yourself under the bar and into a proper position to squat the weight up. Maintain the same bar weight as you did for reps—keeping between 60-80 percent effort—except now perform only single reps.

3

 BENCH PRESS VARIATIONS

The bench press is a gym standard, but a few key variations can help push you past sticking points, should they arise. If you're keen on improving your bench press, try using one of the following:

FLOOR PRESS

Essentially a bench press from the ground, the floor press doesn't make the bench press any easier. Quite the opposite! The nature of the position nearly eliminates the drive of your legs and the arch of your back. The upshot is that this exercise will add productive volume to your upper body and contribute to an improved bench press.

To set up a floor press, simply move what are called the "J" hooks in your squat rack so they sit just low enough that you can un-rack the bar from a lying position on the floor.

From there, drop the bar weight by about 10-15 percent and perform a few more sets after the bench press, using the same number of repetitions you did with the standard bench press.

PAUSED BENCH PRESS/BENCH PRESS FROM PINS

The same guidelines as the pause squats or pin squats apply here. In this case, pause the bench press on your chest for the allotted time or set the safety pins about 1-2 inches above your chest.

Drop the bar weight by 10-20 percent and perform a few more sets at the same rep range with one of these two variations.

CLOSE-GRIP BENCH PRESS

Bring your grip a few inches closer together and perform the press with the same movement as normal. Just be extra careful about keeping your elbows tucked so they remain under this narrow hand spacing.

CLOSE-GRIP BARBELL BENCH PRESS

Drop the weight by 10-15 percent and perform a few more sets of close-grip bench presses using the same repetition numbers as the standard bench press.

Now go out and give these a try!

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LATS & TRAPS: Muscle Activation

If you ever walk into the gym and see guys with terrible back development, you know they’re the ones who don’t do a full range of motion. They can be seen

either not bringing the bar all the way down, or not extending all the way to the top.

The lat pulldown is one of the kings of back exercises. The back has lots of different muscle groups that need to be hit from many different angles. In general, a wide-grip pullup or pulldown and a pronated-grip pulldown both appear to produce greater EMG activity of the latissimus dorsi than a narrow grip or a supinated grip.

There isn’t much research on how the traps are activated during the lat pulldown. Researchers examined muscle activity during different positions of the lat pulldown and found that the latissimus dorsi was activated the most in the fully contracted position of a pullup or pulldown, while the lower trapezius was activated the most in the fully extended position of a pulldown or pullup.

So make sure you pull the bar all the way down and extend the arms all the way to the top to get maximum activation of the target muscles. - FLEX

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Secrets of a Big Back : Arnold Schwarzenegger

QUESTION

What’s the story behind that famous photo of you doing bentover rows barefoot and standing on a bench?

ANSWER

Bodybuilders of my era did a lot of things that people today tend to think of as silly

or dangerous. Certainly, some of the clothes we wore were outlandish (hey, it was the ’70s), and we didn't train as scientifically as some competitors do today, but you can’t argue with our results. Fans always like to rib me about working out barefoot or balancing on benches, but for that particular exercise, the bentover barbell row, I still feel that was an essential part of it. I hardly see the barbell row being performed in gyms anymore.

These days, guys like to use rowing machines and dumbbells to train the back, and these are good options. But I’ll always prefer the old-fashioned bentover row because it’s a much harder exercise. When you use a barbell, you can work with heavier weights than you can with any other implement. Rowing from that bent position trains your lower back and abs at the same time, so you develop tremendous strength throughout your torso that carries over to other exercises like the deadlift and squat. The only thing holding your body up is its own muscle, not a bench or a hand or a weight machine. When my friends and I trained at Gold’s Gym and the Muscle Beach weight pit, we often made rows even more difficult. Balancing on the narrow benches forced us to keep our feet closer together, which made the lift even harder to stabilize. It also allowed us to get a better stretch in our lats as we lowered the weight between reps.

Why barefoot? Well, we were by the beach! But honestly, barefoot training helps to develop your balance and lets you root your feet better. If you think that’s dangerous with iron plates being dropped nearby, ask yourself if the few millimeters of canvas you get from a shoe would make any difference to your toes. I worked up to 315 pounds for sets of 10 or so on the row. See what you can do, and watch your back grow and thicken as a result. - FLEX

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Arnold -- How I used chins to build LATS

There's a scene in Pumping Iron where Arnold Schwarzenegger is weighing out his back in a mirror at Gold's Gym. After outwardly affirming its enormous plane width with an over-the-shoulder look, he turns around to let his amigo Ken Waller assess his back twofold biceps shot. "Resembles a street 

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